There is growing demand by service based industries, such as the financial and sales industries, to continually improve both the effectiveness and speed of business transactions. In developing services and/or products to improve the effectiveness and speed of these business transactions, various entities will typically develop specific applications. A user, such as a customer service representative servicing customer transactions, often will have access to a desktop computer or terminal coupled to a network having access to a large number of applications that may support a variety of transactions. Unfortunately, the user is required to navigate a complicated organizational structure of multiple applications to find the desired application. Additionally, since each specific application may be developed by different entities, these applications are often incompatible. As a result, the complexity of the desktop computer may confuse the user, thus degrading the efficiency of the business transaction, resulting in customer dissatisfaction.
In the financial services industry, efforts are now focused on improving bank branch services as a result of customer sentiment, continuous advantages in branch concepts/technology and economics. Many banks seek solutions to provide themselves with a competitive advantage. Accordingly, banks seek to improve their competitive advantage through increased sales by providing consistent, real-time information on an integrated branch user desktop. As a result, the banking industry is experiencing a need to integrate, many off-the-shelf applications which facilitate various aspects of a banking transaction. For example, software applications that are currently available include fraud prevention applications. These fraud prevention applications typically perform customer authentication and fraud detection.
Other examples of off-the-shelf applications include customer relationship management applications, platform and teller, fraud, branch administration, workflow, knowledge management and training applications. The customer relationship management application may include a financial risk profile, a contact history, a customer preference profile, a customer value profitability indicator, a customer life cycle profile forecasting, a segmenting and product mix sub-application. The sales and maintenance application provides real time alerts and offers needs assessments/advice, management of leads and referrals, dispute resolution, and other functions. The financial/internal branch transactions include service request functions, such as check orders and bond redemption, account maintenance and inquiry, payments and transfers and other sub-applications. The branch administration application may include branch/employee performance metrics, sales incentive tracking, scheduling and staffing models and goals/objectives aligned with incentives. The workflow application may include activity management and workflow, check imaging and document imaging as is known in the art. The term workflow is used to describe applications that are developed as business processes. Workflow applications include forms routing and approval, document review and publishing, and issue tracking. Check imaging refers to applications that scan paper checks into electronic images to improve a Banks check items processing by reducing cost and increasing quality and speed of processing.
The knowledge management application includes integrated policy and procedures, product and pricing information, integrated information and alerts, integrated FAQ's, integrated systems help, and universal knowledge base sub-applications. The training application includes a curriculum guide, a scheduling tool, simulation-based content, new hire training, just-in-time training, and process coaching sub-applications. It is known to provide a single log-in to multiple applications that are accessible through a desktop interface. However, this method does not automatically initiate communicate with another group of applications in subsequent stages of a transaction based on a type transaction. As a result, if one application requires information from another application, then the user typically must manually retrieve the information from one application and input it into the other application. Consequently, such methods do not automatically and dynamically obtain information from one application in order to facilitate a transaction on another application even if the information is available in different applications.
It is also known to provide information from different applications on a single user interface screen. However, upon communication with a group of applications, this method does not automatically communicate with another group of applications in subsequent stages of a transaction based on a type transaction. As a result, a user who needs to access data on an application in response to entering data related to a transaction must typically manually interact with the desired application.
According to yet another method, it is known to provide access for multiple financial applications on a desktop computer or terminal. However, such methods do not typically provide a single sign-on for all relevant applications available by the computer or terminal. Further, such methods do not typically automatically execute an application based on a particular type of transaction. For example, if a customer service representative wanted to know if a product or services offering is available for a particular customer based on a particular type of transaction type, the customer service representative would have to manually sign onto a marketing database and manually enter the marketing database to determine if such an offer is actually available based on the type of transaction being executed.
According to yet another known method, it is known to provide a marketing offer based on a specific transaction type. However, such methods do not typically limit access to applications nor execute an application with respect to the role of the user. As a result, such a system may display access to all applications regardless whether the user has access to the applications or not. For example, such a system would allow a bank teller to view administrative and/or management type applications where the bank teller would not have the need or authorization to access such applications.
These problems and other associated problems can impact the performance of a user, such as a bank teller and the customer experience in a particular type of transaction. These problems, for example, may result in long queues and contradictory advice for the customer. One or more of the above-described problems may also result in the branch user and/or customer being forced to fill out multiple forms with the same information. As a result, a customer typically must endure waiting on the phone or long queues while the bank branch user tries to resolve these problems encountered while servicing a customer request.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method and apparatus that addresses one or more of the above issues.